


details of your devotions

by Catherines_Collections



Category: Sharp Objects (TV)
Genre: Body Horror, Codependency, Gen, Manipulation, Non-Linear Narrative, POV Second Person, Psychopathology & Sociopathy
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-25
Updated: 2018-12-25
Packaged: 2019-09-21 21:09:53
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,137
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17050622
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Catherines_Collections/pseuds/Catherines_Collections
Summary: You know that what can make a body can break it in the same breath.





	details of your devotions

**Author's Note:**

  * For [detonationns](https://archiveofourown.org/users/detonationns/gifts).



> Kill what you can’t save  
> what you can’t eat throw-out  
> what you can’t throw out bury  
>    
> \- Margaret Atwood, from November in “Selected Poems I: 1965-1975″

 

 

 

 

15.

 

 

 

The body, you teach her, can be a gift.

 

 

 

8.

 

 

The first time you visit Momma, you press your hand to the glass before you're seated and keep it there.

Camille’s in the waiting room on the other side of the gates, and you watch your mother’s lips purse when she looks you up and down. You almost don’t remember her without her lipstick and dresses. You don’t remember her looking this old.

You also don’t remember having your stomach lining before she ripped it out of you.

Momma says, “You look good, darling. You look well.”

She doesn’t blink when you tilt your head, and you don’t move your hand.

You say, “Camille’s out of the hospital.”

You say, “We live together now. In the city. We’re better now.”

Momma blinks and you remember Camille has her eyes. You don’t have Camille’s.

You say, “We take care of each other. ”

Your hand starts to fog up the glass.

“Oh,” Momma says, quiet, and you watch her place her hand on yours. You don't know if it's possible for glass to carry warmth but you still feel it.

The guard behind you shifts and you wonder where Camille is, right now, somewhere on the other side of the same building.

Momma bites the inside of her cheek when she smiles at you, small.

“Okay,” she says, and this is the most you've ever wanted to touch her. “Good.”

 

 

 

1.

 

 

 

What Camille learns from you is this:

 

You know how to be both the break and the mend.

 

 

 

13.

 

 

 

There are six ways to fully possess something.

 

You have three methods scratched onto the bottom of your palms, one laced under the sheets of your bed, and Momma locks the other two away in her pretty caretaker box she stores under her sink.

You don’t have to steal the bottles from under the cabinets to know how to use them. Each method strikes a different angle of the same match and you teach yourself how to light the flame as quick as you snuff it out.

You’ve learned how the body attacks, how the mind burns, and you’ve lived thirteen years of twisting them both.

The first time you fuse them goes like this:

Momma doesn’t like how the girls in Wind Gap smile. White teeth and condescension and pink lipped hidden weapons. High school doesn’t equate dominance to most other families in Wind Gap, but Momma’s taught you to know better.

You spend a whole summer teaching yourself to smile right, not too many teeth, not too much lip. When you open your mouth to laugh you bite your tongue before your lips open to keep your teeth from showing.

Momma says  _showy_ translates to _vulnerable_ and you know better than to be either.

You learn to make your smile dainty and delicate. Your body is a tool that you mastered once you learned to wield it. 

The first time Ann smiles at you from your living room she’s rough and jagged and glued to Momma’s side.

When you envision pulling her teeth out, you imagine making them perfect.

 

 

 

5.

 

 

 

Camille says, “I can’t fix what I didn’t break.”

And you want to smack her against the car window, door, windshield until she gets it.

You don’t think Camille’s fixed a thing in her life. _Fixing_ doesn’t apply to this.

Instead, you say, “Okay.”

She doesn’t flinch when you say it, and you watch her hands squeeze the wheel. She doesn’t look at you.

When you turn to your window, you see road and pastures and possibility.

"Okay," you repeat. “I’ll break it for you.”

 

 

4.

 

 

The first time you pound Ann's teeth into your dollhouse, Kelsey won’t stop giggling.

You’re up past your bedtime, Momma went to bed with some sleeping pills, and Kelsey tumbled in with Jodes up through your bedroom window. When they topple in their pupils are blown and Jodes crawls over to offer you a little white tablet to slip under your tongue.

They're laughing at something but you tune it out when you pick the hammer back up.

Jodes says, _We’re like the men behind the curtain._ And you remember how easy she slipped her hand under Ann's neck.

 _Women_ , Kelsey corrects. _Women get thicker curtains._

You know the pill's kicked in when you laugh hard enough that the hammer slips and catches your thumb. Black-blue bruises across your new ivory flooring and you all watch it swell until the color fades to an ash.

Jodes says: _It looks like Ann's neck_ , and Kelsey falls onto her shoulder snorting.

You pound the floor in until it matches the pictures you have of Momma's room, and you listen as Jodes and Kelsey crawl onto your bed.

When Kelsey bares her teeth behind you, Jodes falls off cackling.

 

 

 

6.

 

 

The body is something you know.

 

How to break it; how to create it; how to craft what you burnt and build it back up again into something better. Stronger is relative to the background of the breakage, but you’ve learned how to form around that.

You've learned how to survive it. 

When Camille first rides into town, you can hear hers singing from every inch of Wind Gap. You know how the body is formed from everything it’s ever survived, and Camille’s sounds like burned angels screeching.

The first time you see her you want to hug her and never let her go.

You want to ask about the baggy clothes and her life and Marian and how Momma never says either name.

You want to crack her open and learn her from the inside out.

When you see her you think, _Oh_.

You think, _Momma lied._

 

 

  
12.

 

 

Mae’s neck snaps like it was born just to be broken.

The sound reverberates through the city and ends pressed up against your chest. It brushes Camille’s window ledge like it's bragging, but you’re not that cocky. You wrap it up like a gift; one more body, one more way out.

You don’t have help to keep Mae quiet so you make it quick, painful, and press her harder against the fence. She still chokes like the others but you don’t take her teeth. There’s no big bad wolf if there’s not a pattern to follow back home.

When you find Camille with the dollhouse, the teeth in her hands laugh when they call you _wolf._

 

 

 

3.

 

 

More than half of your insides ending up in iron buckets over the course of fourteen years teaches you three things:

 

_One—_

 

Wind Gap will not save you.

Maybe you don't want it to.

Momma and Alan started their game long before you came into the picture, and every paid-off-officer and street-crazy church goer can't seem to see the web when they're still a part of the strings. You don't like being the third-place puzzle piece, but Momma doesn't let you dwell on it for too long.

She tucks you in every night and sings you a lullaby. You create a twin melody and play it each time you say how much you love her. You tune it to her smile and it's never a lie. You have ten truths and this is the purest one.

When she kisses your forehead, you stop looking for traces of poison.

 

_Two—_

 

You are going to die in this house.

If the house doesn't kill you, it still won't give you enough time to burn it from the inside out. You don't know if you would want to.

When you make your own small scale copy, you make it perfect. You build it backwards— locks first, doors second. You build too many walls the first time. The second time you make them right in every detail, copy it down to every sense.

You model the scale after Momma's and keep it even neater. It's a promise in the premature.

The floors take you six months and even then you still haven't finished Momma's room.

For the first nine months, no one else gets to touch the house besides her and you.

 

_Three—_

 

You know that what can make a body can break it in the same breath.

In the fourteen years of tuning yours, something clicks.

 

 

 

7.

 

 

 

Camille looks at you, and you think—

 

 

 

10.

 

 

Camille doesn’t touch the dollhouse and you don’t ask her too.

She cleans up the blood and cancels the apartment’s lease, and you wet a washcloth to place on the back of her neck while you hold her hair back from the toilet.

When she goes to bed she doesn’t move for two days. You hid Mae's body so they wouldn't find it for another three. Camille leaves the door unlocked. You pack all of the boxes but one and curl up on the bed behind her when you’re finished.

She doesn’t flinch when you take her hand.

 

 

9.

 

 

You break Natalie into two pieces easier than she moved as one.

The next week, you watch part of your stomach break into pieces and fall straight into Momma’s brass sick bowl.

Jodes sneaks the teeth in through a sewn up teddy bear tucked into a  _Get Well Soon_ basket that Momma doesn’t touch again after Kelsey delivers it.

You notice that when your stomach lining stays in place, Momma doesn't touch your dollhouse.

 

 

 

11.

 

 

On the third day you tell Camille, “Momma killed all her daughters, you know.”

When Camille laughs the sound gasps out between all the covers. It makes the room feel warmer and you press your feet against her calves seeking it out.

"It's funny," she says, "how I've tried harder to die than this."

It isn't funny, really. There’s a story itching the tip of your tongue and you think about tracing her scars and comparing your own.

Still, it doesn't keep you from laughing.

 

 

 

2.

 

 

You wrap Alan around your finger the same way he thinks he has you tied into a knot.

Momma plays the balance game with you two, and you have two fingers and a pinky where he has the index and thumb.

When you're cutting out Natalie's teeth, you wonder what it'd take to gain the whole hand.

Momma liked to play executioner and so she shaped Alan into her jury.

You don't think she meant to make you the noose.

 

 

 

17.

 

 

You buy a pack of licorice and a bottle of sprite when Kelsey takes you all to the gas station. The night is dead and quiet and desolate, and you want to shatter its atmosphere until it turns into something singing.

Jodes splits a bag of baked potato chips with you that she keeps crunched between the middle of your seats, and smiles every time you try to balance one on your nose.

Kelsey weaves through back roads and makes it a race: her against the boys; you all against the things bruising the bottom of your backs.

Jodes pops half her body out the window as one of the boys you picked up somewhere along the way turns up the music. Crumbs cover your fingers and flood the backseat and you can’t stop laughing at how Jodes starts to scream out the window.

Your vision’s blurry and you can still taste the chalk from the pill under your tongue.

The song ends but Jodes is still screaming and one of the boys tries to pull her back in once Kelsey joins in and presses the gas harder. They're all laughing.

You think, _it feels like a movie_ , and imagine what new boy number two is going to look like smashed up against Kelsey’s windshield.

You don’t laugh, but boy number two still leans across the seat to tell you how pretty your smile looks in the sunlight.

 

 

 

16.

 

 

 

Camille looks at you and you think, _Oh_.

 

The click turns almost audible. Camille stares at you like she's trying to find an answer and you don't know how to tell her it isn't there.

 

She looks at you miles away from Momma and Marian and the ghost house and you think:  _okay_.

 

You think, _finally_.

 

 

 

18.

 

 

 

Sometimes, you wonder what Marian represented.

If a cross would have fit in with your backyard, you know you'd have found her pinned to it.

Momma had three daughters and she killed each of them the same way she buried them, quick and public and hungry _—_ a martyr, a saint, and a sinner.

You are still dead but you are not your sisters and you are not their corpses.

 _You_ know better than to be a thing afraid of itself.

 

 

 

14.

 

 

Camille crosses another state line and says, " _Fine_."

She looks at you miles from Chicago, from Wind Gap, from anything else and says, "Alright, Amma. Show me."

When you smile at her, you use all your teeth.

 

 

 

 

 

 

**Author's Note:**

> Here I am,  
> your crisis in white.  
> With flowers up and down my dress,  
> with a gold cuff digging into my arm.  
> What part of our bodies are not fauna.  
> What part of us is actually here.  
>    
> — Megan Fernandes, from “Venus, Aged,”
> 
>  
> 
>  
> 
> It surely has been a while. I own nothing & the title is from an essay of Mary Oliver's. 
> 
> Happy Yuletide! I truly truly hope this turned out how you imagined, that you enjoyed your yuletide gift, & that this is everything you wanted <3


End file.
